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A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances.
good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.
At some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we become our children’s parents instead.
Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those “errors” we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants’ favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail,
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Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it. Not because I believed he was guilty, I assure you, but precisely because he was innocent.
A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who’s been indicted.
no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but after all, we were children.
In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention—the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.”
“The difference is it’s not a crime to be athletic or musical or smart. We need to be very careful about locking people up for what they are rather than what they do. There is a very long ugly history of that sort of thing.”
This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe.
I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.
They had nothing in common except their glaring lack of qualifications for the job. It was almost comical how ignorant they were of the law, of how trials worked, even of this case, which had been splashed all over the newspapers and evening news. They were chosen for their perfect ignorance of these things. That is how the system works. In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It would be funny if it were not so perverse.
“Precisely how the electrical signals and chemical reactions occurring second by second in the human body make the leap to thought, motivation, impulse—where the physical machinery of man stops and the ghost in the machine, consciousness, begins—is not truly a scientific question, for the simple reason that we cannot design an experiment to capture, measure or duplicate it. For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will.” —PAUL HEITZ, “Neurocriminology and Its Discontents,”
Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you.
